1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for retrieving and presenting digital data in response to a search for desired digital data by a user using a terminal connected to a network that has digital archives of multimedia data including text, voice, still images and video.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A search engine provided on a network, such as the Internet, is usually employed to retrieve digital data provided on the network, using terminals connected to the network. While search engines use various search and retrieval techniques, basically a search engine searches for information that exactly matches, or partially matches, keywords that a user inputs via the terminal. The search engine extracts the uniform resource locations (URLs) of content items that match the search criteria and presents the results to the user, organized into a certain order.
The above type of retrieved information presentation apparatus therefore only retrieves information based on matching of keywords input by the user, and does not take into account the volume of the extracted content, the quality of the network between the terminal and a digital archive including the content, and whether the terminal performance can handle the presentation or playback of the content concerned. It is therefore possible that the quality of the retrieved information obtained by the user may be low. Thus, users are not always satisfied with such apparatuses.
An object of the present invention is to provide an apparatus for retrieving and presenting digital data that takes communication quality into consideration and presents the digital data retrieval results promptly, in response to a user request.